How to do broken link building properly and get fantastic results

Broken link building tactics have been around for a long time. So everyone tries it. But many find it time-consuming and not worth the effort.

But if you can do it with a process, it works. It’s also super scalable. In this post, I will show you how you can broken link building and get stunning results.

Before I talk about how you can do it properly, let’s talk about what it is. First, you need to find a broken link people have linked to. Then you need to recreate the content on your blog and tell anyone linking to the broken page to instead link to your content.

People don’t like dead links. So if your recreated content is good, they’ll happily link to it.

1. Find dead pages on popular sites

Make a list of the top sites in your niche. Then use Ahrefs Broken Link Checker to find broken link building opportunities. Here’s how:

You’ll see find a lot of dead pages that people have linked to. Now use Wayback Machine to see what the article was about.

Repeat this for a couple of sites. You’ll probably find hundreds of pages you can work with.

2. Find broken links on those sites

To find broken links on those sites, go to Outgoing links -> Broken links. You’ll find links to external pages that are no longer available. Do a quick check and see if you can recreate any of those links.

To get more from that dead link, use Ahref’s Site Explorer to analyze the dead link. You’ll see other referring domains (people who have linked to the same dead link). You can also reach them after you’ve recreated that page.

3. Scrap link pages/resources

This is the most common tactics for finding dead links. To do this, first, you need to use Google find resource pages in your niche. For example, if your niche is weight loss, you could search:

Now use Scrapebox scrape all these results. Then extract the outbound links from all the pages. You can use Scrapebox or ScreamingFog to do this. These two will also identify 404’s.

Finally, paste your list of broken links into Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool and identify the best opportunities for link building. Quickly recreate the content, reach out to the people linking to that page and offer your link.

Finding opportunities isn’t enough. You need to reach out to people and ask them to link to your page. This is the hardest part. But don’t worry. Using a basic process, you’ll get pretty good results.

1. Reach out to the right people

A lot of people use outreach software to find email addresses and then send the same email to all of them. No wonder they don’t get any results.

You need to reach out to the right people. If you use an outreach software to scrape email address, a lot of the time you would reach to the wrong person. For example, it doesn’t make any sense to reach out to the CEO of a medium-sized company with your link building request. You need to reach out to the person responsible for contents.

If you can’t find their address in their blog, check their social media account. If that’s no help, reach out to them on Twitter.

2. Write a very concise message

When you are writing the subject line, keep it short. Otherwise, people won’t see the whole subject line on a mobile device. You should also A/B test your subject line to see which one yields a higher open rate. Your goal should be at least 35% to 50% open rate.